Why is Teaching Rhyming So Important?

Rhyming is an important part of the early childhood experience, both in and out of the classroom. But WHY is teaching rhyming to young children so important?

After posting about teaching children letters, a friend of mine (from my kindergarten days) asked me about teaching rhyming. She works with kindergarten English Language Learners and wanted more ideas about how to incorporate rhyming. In speaking to her, I was inspired to write a short series about rhyming in early childhood.

What is rhyming?

Yes, I’m sure all of you already know that rhyming words sound the same at the end! 🙂 It’s a phonemic awareness skill, meaning that it’s all about manipulating oral language. Rhyming is just a part of phonemic awareness . . . of working with language, sounds within language, and playing with language.

Why is teaching rhyming important?

Oh, teaching rhyming is important for so many reasons! To begin with, a multitude of research has shown a correlation between rhyming mastery and eventual reading preparedness. Now, if your child isn’t a rhyming machine right now, please don’t freak out! This doesn’t mean she’s going to be a below-average reader when she’s older. It just means that you can incorporate more rhyming activities into your day. I’ll be touching on that later on this week, so keep an eye out.

On top of that, rhyming helps kids improve their oral language skills overall. It helps them to playfully manipulate their language, which gives them a kind of “permission” to manipulate language in other ways. Children have more ownership over their language when they’re encouraged to change it and play with how they speak.

As previously mentioned, rhyming is an aspect of phonemic awareness (awareness of how to listen to, identify, and change around the sounds in spoken language). Phonemic awareness lays the groundwork for written language. Rhyming is a precursor to learning how to read and write.

Rhyming is fun. It just is, especially when kids get to throw in some of their own nonsense words. This sense of fun shows children the learning can be entertaining and interesting!

The Rhyming Series

This is part of a week-long series of posts regarding teaching kids about rhyming. Click below to be directed to the rest of the series.

question is when working with DLL ‘s how does the rhyming thing look? Its important to teach in the home language….except often within a classroom there is not a bilingual with the knowledge to do so, and parents who should be teaching this important step in promoting literacy often see it from the stand point that they want their children speaking English. I know there is much more research addressing these questions just wondering if you could point me in the right direction.

Hi Kimberly, thank you for your question! I taught kindergarten for 5 years, and the majority of my students each year were English Language Learners. I taught only in English, which means that my students were learning the language on top of everything else. Unfortunately, what the children were doing (or not doing) in their home language was not something I could control. Which is likely what you’re dealing with.

The key here is perseverance and exposure — kids need to keep being exposed to rhyming in all its forms, over and over again. ELL need that exposure and repetition even more! Even if it doesn’t seem to be “working”, it is! ELL may just take longer to internalize all of the information. If you look through research from NAEYC, the Reading Recovery Council, and the International Reading Association, you’ll see the same information.

Use the ideas from the rest of this rhyming series for your ELL, even if at first it doesn’t seem to be getting through. Bring in tons of fun songs and books. Make the teaching meaningful to the kids. If possible, remind the children’s parents that their home language is important too! Hearing songs, listening to books, and talking in their primary language with their family won’t hurt English language development. Encourage rhyming games at home in their native language. ELL are just as capable of learning literacy concepts as their English-only peers. It just takes longer sometimes because of the course of language acquisition.

Hello! I teach ELL preschoolers, and they have a particularly difficult time with rhyming because it isn’t a component of their home language. Does anyone have suggestions for implementing rhyming successfully in an ELL curriculum? Some of the activities that do well for English speaking children don’t go so well for ELL students, so I have stressed it less in my curriculum.

I have a 3 1/2 year old that speaks Spanish at home. My mainly objective is to make him bilingual. My son is very talkative and started to speak earlier than expected. As somebody explained before, rhyming is not that critical prerequisite to reading and writing. My daughter is 6 years old and had a tough start in kindergarten and i don’t want the same to happen to my son.. It seems that my son doesn’t get rhyming yet, It’s very frustrating so I have decided to go even simpler. I started to teach the vocabulary that goes with the rhyming pictures and now I’m exposing him only to words that rhyme without asking him yet if it rhymes. I also decided to read the rhymes (3 little kittens) and not to play them with background music. I have seen some improvement. I hope it helps!

Thanks so much for sharing your experience, Carolina. I do have to disagree with what you were told – rhyming (and other oral language learning) is indeed important for reading. I agree that kids need to experience rhyming in many different ways (songs, books, games, etc.)! At 3, that’s what kids should be exploring, without the pressure of having to identify if it rhymes. Lots and lots of modeling, too!

Hi Mary Catherine,
Thank you for sharing this article with us.I was planning to use this article to make a mini-lesson plan for my assignment. How can I cite this information in my reference as I could not find the year on this article?
Thanks!

I have a new high school student in my structured literacy OG class. It is a small group of students. Language deficits were obvious immediately. I had the speech and language teacher give this student a phonemic awareness assessment and this student had major deficits in different areas, including rhyming. Almost all PA activities and insstruction is targeted toward much younger students. Do you have any information that I can use with this student, especially for rhyming.

Hi Donna! I haven’t worked with high school students very much, and those I have worked with haven’t needed rhyming instruction. My inclination would be to fall back on a lot of what works with younger children – books with rhymes, songs, poems, and games. But, yes, you’d want to find materials that are interesting to a high school student, rather than a young child. I’ll see if any of my high school teacher friends have suggestions (and I’ll come back here to fill you in if they do).

[…] Rhyming is a huge part of early childhood education, and children love it. There’s something innately silly about manipulating words and sounds, which makes it fun for the kiddos. Here’s a very simple rhyming activity to try along with the nursery rhyme Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. […]

[…] has proven it. For information on why rhyming is important for little ones and for practical ideas, pop over to Fun-A-Day for a series of easy-to-read posts. If you’re here to grab the freebie keep on […]

[…] 2. Teach songs and rhymes: Children’s songs and rhymes help your kiddo learn to hear the natural rhythms of spoken language. Introduce your child to books and materials that focus on rhymes. As with word families, rhymes help children hear the phonetic connections between words with similar spellings and sounds. For more fun, rhyming activities and resources, check out this series of posts from Fun-A-Day. […]